The story behind the story: Edward Keenan on Some Great Idea

This is a feature in which authors reflect on a passage from their latest work. Today, Edward Keenan discusses his new book Some Great Idea.

In Toronto, I’ve lived in Riverdale, Scarborough, at Danforth and Coxwell, in the Annex, Harbord Village, Bloorcourt Village, the Junction. In Toronto, I’ve worked for small business owners from India, the U.S., Sri Lanka, Korea, China, the Carribean, England and Russia. In Toronto, I’ve worked at a chemical factory in an industrial park and at a day camp in a low-income housing development; I’ve cut the grass at a military base and at the sides of the highways in North York and Etobicoke; I’ve been a shoe salesman and a candy-counter attendant at the mall; I’ve been a telemarketer and a walking courier in the financial district; I’ve owned a restaurant on Yonge, and I’ve worked as a writer surveying the whole civic panorama. My Toronto contains multitudes. It contains my whole life.

Toronto is the setting for my biography, but as I suggested earlier, it’s more importantly also a character in it, as it is for millions of other people. Toronto’s the place where all those biographies intersect, where personal narratives become social ones, where all our stories come together in one larger story that contains tragedy and comedy and ecstasy and heartbreak. It is our mythology. And we’re still writing it.

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There was a point, trying to figure out how to write a book that made sense of Toronto’s topsy-turvy politics over the past decade or so, when I realized a couple things. One was that politics itself is really about storytelling: the story you tell about how things are going, and how they got to be that way, will dictate where you think it should go next. And this is true of the city itself, not as a place but as a thing that we think about and talk about. Is Toronto doing well? Is it going to hell? What’s the story of the city? Mel Lastman and David Miller and Rob Ford and their respective supporters told very different stories about the city, so I realized that looking at the stories we tell ourselves and why—and highlighting some of the stories I think we should tell ourselves—was a big part of what Some Great Idea was going to be about. Another think I realized was that my attachment to the material, to the city and the story of it, was fiercely personal. I love Toronto, and it has always been my home, and those two facts are virtually impossible for me to separate from my analysis of the place and its politics. For better and for worse (and I think it is for both) my understanding of the city and the way I look at it is deeply informed by the places I’ve lived, the things I’ve done here, the people I talk to, the stories of Toronto I’ve witnessed with my own eyes. I do a lot of reading about politics and planning, but I understand the city most fundamentally through experience. I can’t separate the discussion of improved transit or excessive car use in Scarborough from my own experience walking half an hour in the cold along the windswept, pedestrian-free Markham Road to my job selling shoes at the mall. Those two things—that it was a book about different civic stories, and that my own story would be a big part of how I looked at them—provided the frame that the rest of the book sits within. It let me establish my premises about the mythology of the city that exists now, and gave me a way into telling and examining the more well-known political stories of what’s happening in the mayor’s office. And the understanding of Toronto as a mythology still being written helped explain some of the city’s identity problems and helped suggest hope for the way forward.